It is the opinion of some French anti-slavery writers that the engages might have tilled the soil of Hayti to this day, if they had labored for themselves alone.  This is doubtful; the white man can work in almost every region of the Southern States, but he cannot raise cotton and sugar upon those scorching plains.  It is not essential for the support of an anti-slavery argument to suppose that he can.  Nor is it of any consequence, so far as the question of free-labor is concerned, either to affirm or to deny that the white man can raise cotton in Georgia or sugar in Louisiana.  The blacks themselves, bred to the soil and wonted to its products, will organize free-labor there, and not a white man need stir his pen or his hoe to solve the problem.

At first it seems as if the letters-patent of Louis XV. were inspired by some new doctrine of free-trade.  And he did cherish the conviction that in the matter of the slave-trade it was preferable to a monopoly; but his motive sprang from the powerful competition of England and Holland, which the Guinea Company faced profitably only while the War of Succession secured to it the asiento.  The convention of merchants which Louis XIV. called in Paris, during the year 1701, blamed monopolies in the address which it drew up, and declared freedom of trade to be more beneficial to the State; but this was partly because the Guinea Company arbitrarily fixed the price of slaves too high, and carried too few to the colonies.

So a free-trade in negroes became at last a national necessity.  Various companies, however, continued to hold or to procure trading privileges, as the merchants were not restrained from engaging in commerce in such ways as they preferred.  The Cape-Verde, the South-Sea, the Mississippi or Louisiana, and the San-Domingo Companies tried their fortunes still.  But they were all displaced, and free-trade itself was swallowed up, by the union of all the French Antilles under the great West-India Company of 1716.  This was hardly done before the Government discovered that the supply of negroes was again diminishing, partly because so extensive a company could not undertake the peculiar risks and expenses of a traffic in slaves.  So in the matter of negroes alone trade was once more declared free in 1741, burdened only with a certain tax upon every slave imported.

At this time the cultivation of sugar alone in the principal French islands consumed all the slaves who could be procured.  The cry for laborers was loud and exacting, for the French now made as much sugar as the English, and were naturally desirous that more negroes should surrender the sweets of liberty to increase its manufacture.  In less than forty years the average annual export of French sugar had reached 80,000 hogsheads.  In 1742 it was 122,541 hogsheads, each of 1200 pounds.  The English islands brought into the market for the same year only 65,950 hogsheads, a decrease which the planters attributed